The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power is the nation’s largest municipal utility, the exclusive provider of electricity to the city’s roughly four million residents through a mix of natural gas, coal, nuclear and other sources.

To get from its current usage of renewables — about 23 percent — up to 100 percent would involve an outright reinvention of how the city powers itself, analysts say.

Councilman Mike Bonin, a co-author of the motion, said that’s why rather than simply set a deadline, a panel of researchers and stakeholders was needed to first identify the roadblocks.

Officials say one of the trickiest challenges is likely to be energy storage.

The problem with solar and wind energy is they are intermittent. When sunshine fades or the wind dies down, so does the power they generate.

A total reliance on renewable energy will require a major expansion of the utility’s capacity to store energy for use at other times. To get there, officials said they are looking at least in part to the promise of batteries.

Energy storage technology has advanced swiftly in the last few years. In 2013, California ordered its three investor-owned utilities to sharply scale up their energy storage capacity, essentially setting off a surge in the market for battery technology, said Michael Brune, the executive director of the Sierra Club.

Just last week, Tesla announced that it had been chosen by Southern California Edison to build the world’s biggest lithium-ion battery storage project, able to hold enough energy to power 2,500 household for a day.

For the moment, however, battery systems remain too costly to help integrate renewables on a large scale, government agencies say. To get around that problem, Los Angeles is counting on time.

Just as solar panels have leapt in efficiency and plummeted in price, so goes the hope for batteries.

“We’re seeing the technology get better and get less expensive with each passing year,” said Mr. Bonin, the council member. “So we want to be able to sort of look forward and plan for what we think is coming.”

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Anthony Strong, right, deconstructing a roasted pig at Pizzeria Delfina in Palo Alto.Credit
Jason Henry for The New York Times

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It praised its ambitious commitment to eliminate all traffic deaths by 2024 under the slogan Vision Zero, a safety project that gained urgency in June after the deaths of two cyclists by hit-and-run drivers.

San Francisco is also the heart of Bay Area Bike Share, a new program that plans to add 4,500 bikes in the city and another 2,500 across the Bay Area by its completion in early 2018.

Other California cities were well represented down the rankings, with Oakland coming in at 21, Los Angeles 24, San Jose 26, Long Beach 28, Sacramento 37 and Thousand Oaks 49.

California Today goes live at 6 a.m. Pacific time weekdays. Tell us what you want to see: CAtoday@nytimes.com.